There are many situations where it might be desirable to send notifications to and receive responses from a group of individuals that are designated as contacts for a particular business. For example, an outbound campaign system may be employed to automatically send notifications to the designated individuals in order to, for example, alert the individuals of a situation. The notifications may be sent, for example, as part of an outbound campaign. The event or situation triggering the notifications may cause multiple types of notifications to be sent to the different individuals.
A conventional outbound campaign system distributes notifications across recipients and channels according to a preset campaign without regard, generally, to responses/actions that may be taken in response to the notifications. For example, in a conventional outbound campaign system, when the first recipient responds to the text message indicating acknowledgement of the notification, the second recipient who is scheduled to receive his or her own set of notifications still often receives the notifications despite the fact that the first recipient may have already received and acknowledged his or her notification. Thus, in a conventional outbound campaign system, modifications (other than, e.g., pacing) are generally not made to an ongoing campaign based on results of the campaign.
The traditional approach for outbound campaigns may present several problems. First, the outbound campaign system may send out more notifications than necessary; thus, incurring unnecessary cost. Second, as the recipients are not updated as to who has acknowledged an alert, a recipient may respond to the alert even after a different recipient has acknowledged the alert, unnecessarily using up telecommunication resources. Third, in the conventional approach, each recipient is responsible for determining if another recipient has acknowledged the notification. As a result, each recipient may have to take time to respond to the notification and also check that the condition that triggered the notification was corrected.
What is desired is a notification solution that does not rely on a traditional outbound campaign approach to transmit notifications. The notification solution should reduce overhead for a group of recipients in terms of time and effort, and should also reduce system notification costs by avoiding unnecessary notifications.
The above information disclosed in this Background section is only for enhancement of understanding of the background of the invention, and therefore it may contain information that does not form the prior art that is already known to a person of ordinary skill in the art.